John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand

A young activist and highly-educated Cambridge Union debater, Mill would become in time the highest-ranked English thinker of the nineteenth century, the author of the landmark essay On Liberty and one of the most passionate reformers and advocates of his revolutionary, opinionated age. As a journalist he fired off a weekly article on Irish land reform as the people of that nation starved, as an MP he introduced the first vote on women's suffrage, fought to preserve free-speech and opposed slavery, and, in his private life, pursued for two decades a love affair with another man's wife.

To understand Mill and his contribution, Richard Reeves explores his life and work in tandem. His book is a riveting and authoritative biography of a man raised to promote happiness, whose life was spent in the pursuit of truth and liberty for all.

LibraryThing Review

User Review - gmicksmith - LibraryThing

From his unusual childhood education to his climax as a leading intellectual of his day John Stuart Mill's biography is an intriguing one. I would not say he was a firebrand but more of a smoldering ...Read full review

About the author (2015)

Richard Reeves is a leading social and political commentator, writing regularly for the Observer, New Statesman, Guardian, and Prospect. He is a former Columnist of the Year and Young Financial Journalist of the Year and has held research fellowships at the Institute for Public Policy Research and the University of London. He is the author of Dream Hoarders, about the rise of a class-based society in America.